The above series of paintings were an experiment in value. The top three were painted using only one color. It is not as easy as it looks. I had read in several watercolor books about trying this and then painting the scene in color. I did that with the desert scene. It was very helpful for the desert scene because the reference I used for it was very blurry and mostly mid tones. It was so bad that I could not decipher colors very well. By having done a value study, before hand, the actual color painting worked out really well.

The above is a painting I did on a grunge background. I have a tutorial for this technique here.

I had a wet canvas reference photo for this laying around for about a year. I had found it in the industrial photos and have no idea what it is. It looked too difficult for me to even attempt and the colors in the photo were really dull. I took this on as a challenge and tried to make it a little more interesting by brightening the color and paying attention to how I rendered all the different shapes.